Darwin's Love of Life by Karen L. Harel

Author:Karen L. Harel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

A NOTE FOR THE ANNALS OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM

In studying emotional commonalities, Darwin used “his usual process of empathy and identification,” as Hyman described it, and manifested an “affiliation with life,” to return to Wilson’s definition. Darwin felt organized beings’ inner lives, their drives, and the logic of their actions, whether those organized beings were human or otherwise. His granddaughter noted that “his sympathetic participation in the lives of the creatures he observed helped him to understand their habits.” So it happens that he exhorted us: “With respect to female birds feeling a preference for particular males we must bear in mind that we can judge of choice being exerted, only by placing ourselves in the same position.” Say what? Walk a mile in the shoes of a female bird deciding with whom to mate? Think what a bird thinks? What kind of person could think this is not merely a wild flight of fancy? Someone who often takes such leaps (see chapter 3).

Darwin wrote anthropomorphically because his theory pushed him to think anthropomorphically. In a complement to the rigor of his taxonomic work and as a testament to the diversity of his modes of inquiry, he conducted empathetic thought experiments, for example, when he speaks for the thoughts of a female bird or of a dog, when he imagines the reasons for the actions of Drosera, a bee, a chimpanzee, and so many others. He commented in his travelogue that one night in South America he could not eat his dinner because he could hear his horse gnawing at its post and knew it was hungry.

In Darwin’s day, natural philosophers and scientists stigmatized anthropomorphism. Darwin’s exposed him to much criticism and contributed to his disrepute. But, again, yesterday’s discreditable anthropomorphism is today’s anecdotal cognitivism. Darwin knew in his bones that we share feelings with animals. He once emphasized in a notebook: “Animals—whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals.—Do not slave-holders wish to make the black man other kind?—Animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead—respect.”

For Darwin, animals were brethren, as in: “If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death & suffering; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements … from our origin in one common ancestor, we may all be netted together.” The modern primatologist Frans de Waal, who studies culture in animals, comments that “anthropomorphism acknowledges continuity between humans and animals” and is “part and parcel of the way the human mind works.” This aspect of Homo sapiens may have been complete heresy in Darwin’s day, but it was A-B-C to de Waal and a quintessential aspect of the biophilia that Wilson describes as being at one with all of life.

So in the context of biophilia, Darwin’s anthropomorphism accords his sense of commonality, of the one living spirit. The way he wrote The Descent of Man, as the Darwin scholar Will Durant has noted, was

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